Twilight: Half-Light Consequences
by melanie.deeee
Summary: The ultimate love story
1. Chapter 1

The metal bird streaked the pallid sky with a thick onyx trail of chem, permanently marking the planet's atmosphere with a chart of acrid gridlines. Edward Culinary, famed TV chef and former vampire, now heavily pregnant with child, checked his watch. Thirty-seven hundred hours, Celesteday the Forty-Fifth. A good year. But not for Edward. In the seat adjacent, Sailer's Mauden, Edward's only friend, was playing his trombone with impassioned vigor, such that indigo flowers were beginning to sprout from the notes Sailer's was conjuring, allowing themselves tangible form as they drifted from reality to reality and nestled themselves over in the aisle in front. Sailer's ceased playing, and Edward reached over and lapped up all the flowers for himself, snarling but with all the guttural menace of a toy kitten whose batteries have started to melt after years of wear and unconditional childly love, and is now resigned to a faint distorted mewling that symbolises eerily the slow decay of childhood wonder. Edward began to suckle upon the sweet petals of the deadly and enticing outgrowths of his companion's primal melodies. They made him drowsy.

Edward Culinary slumbered then. He dreamt of omelettes.

Just then a crackling disembodied voice announced listlessly that they were experiencing some "unexpected turbulence". The voice was that of the pilot, who was a glowing orb with trendy shades and a Bachelor of Pansexual Bat Studies, for which he was still twenty thousand SpladeCreds in debt.

The ethereal ghost of a recently deceased giant phoenix had latched onto the mechanical sky-skirting vehicle, and was making clumsy love to it in one last triumphant exertion of excess - the kind for which the flaming bird had been almost legendary in life - before it continued upon its trudging ascent to the heavens.

The pl*ne shuddered violently.

Edward Culinary slept on, blissfully unaware of the chaos that surrounded him. He was still dreaming of omelettes - of forging a perfect omelette from the h*eckflames of Durisszi, a city Edward would now never have the chance to visit.

Sailer's whispered a resigned prayer to his pantheon of Vauri gods, who were said to live and ceaselessly jam together in a concert hall in an entirely different dimension's heaven:

"The Drummer provideth the rhythm and the Harpist the melody and the Singer the words of this world. Whyfore then must we drown these in the static of modernity? Be we so fearful of the Rhapsody of Existence? Farewell, my slumbering chum, and rock on."

"_Omelettes..._" murmured the half-conscious Edward, glazed eyes gazing still at their shuttered fleshy lids.

Just then the deceased phoenix's spectre climaxed violently. Reality was rended in twain.

And that, babies, is how the glistening city of Fawkes, Arizona was founded.


	2. Chapter 2

**AN: Fangs 4 da positive reviews (geddit cos vampires hath fangs lol)**

* * *

The city of Fawkes, AZ was not known as the Glistening City for nothing, Bellatrix Swann reflected as she slipped a pair of dark sunglasses behind the silken lilac veil she wore over her face. Her nimble gloved hands returned then to the Harley Davidson's handlebars, but for naught: the dazzling gauntlet of storefronts, cafes and strip-clubs lining VALENCIA RD seemed to stretch on to the point of infinity. And damn, how the faces of these commercial establishments did so lustrously _gleam! _For some reason quite unknown to anyone, every structure that had ever been erected in the Gleaming City since its (admittedly recent) inception was prone to glow dazzlingly. Simple brick-and-mortar 26/8's glowed as if they had been chiseled from diamond cliff-faces straight from the delicately surreal landscapes of a sickly only child's recurring fever dream. Nobody used electric lighting, for it was not necessary. Bellatrix felt uneasy. She had never been one to trust anything that sparkled so. She rode on.

Gaggles of vape babies and trickled lucidly into the illuminated night, drifting between barfronts and abandoned parking lots like pallid wraiths suspended in transient flux betwixt the varying metaphysical states of mortality, that they might finish penning their memoirs with their neo-braille lazerfont text and pop-up hologifs of grossly exaggerated sexual escapades from their pasts. Such fleeting and migratory singularities were these slaves of aesthet that they were ever wandering the weekends and never arriving anywhere. Occasionally Bellatrix would watch a stray bespectacled patrol orb brush brusquely past such a pack of chemoids, and then perform a clandestine, orb-crevice-protrusion-ject-administered blood test upon the runt(s) and straggler(s), by whom the orbs were seldom even detected until some moments later, when the vape baby/ies in question would feel an acute sting in a randomly-assigned limb like a sudden pang of existential anxiety on a sleepless summer night, and just sort of wordlessly _know._ You know?

A user-interface-personalised billboard hovering overhead scanned Bellatrix's HUBFRIENDS profile, which information was retained upon her mandatory digital retinal implants for quote unquote "ease of social access _(sic)_ and public marketing precision" (Zura's official line, which Bellatrix dismisses, not unwisely, as a load of invasive hypodermic corporate friff) and then proceeded to tactlessly offer her a promotional glimpse at an episode from the fifth and final season of her late lover Edward Culinary's Cooking Adventures, a HUBSTREAM-exclusive series. She knew immediately that it was one of the show's later episodes because of the grey stubble plastered across Edward's milky face, the unmistakable moss of five o'clock shadow obscuring his once-attractive complexion, and the fact that by this late point in the program's history Edward had become totally, obsessively consumed with the singular ambition of forging a perfect omelette, so much so that he had exclusively devoted the final run of episodes to this bizarre endeavour. Bellatrix shuddered, recalling more than she would have cared to recall of that turbulent and frequently surreal phase of her mortal existence, during which Edward's soul and hers had been deeply and painfully entwined. She spat at the blurred and shimmering asphalt beneath her (the spit forming an acidic crateric _(sic)_ aberration where it struck) and rode on.

Just then she received a telepathic vidcall from her reptilian mentor, one Scaleself Veilself Herself Brittney Spheres.

_"Bellatricksssss..." _said Brittney Spheres, her flickering holoform dancing jerkily through the concavity of Bellatrix's data-addled mind, to which her (Bellatrix's) retinal implants served as a psychic doorway of sorts, _"Thou mussst not tarry on thy quesssst to retrieve the Masssssk of Rivenhoackssssss."_

"I know," Bellatrix said shortly, dazzled anew by the blurry array of lights casting their queer postdisco glamour upon every square inch of her ethereal ephemeral form, including all the inches she had elected to keep veiled or otherwise concealed from all the night dust that touched the air that touched the universe beyond her.

She could feel a piercing migraine coming on as she continued to glide toward her impending spatial destination.

_Almost there, _Bellatrix assured herself. And Brittney Spheres, too, she supposed, if the veiled reptilian still happened to be wading idly through the murky swamp of Bellatrix's soupy grey matter...

Which she was.


End file.
